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| Emily Miller (center) with her country music band, the Sweetback Sisters, competes this Saturday on national radio. Photo by Dave Tarbell |
Musician with Local Ties to Compete on National Radio This Saturday
Emily Miller, a 2005 graduate of Brown University, who has played at contra dances in Rehoboth, MA, will be performing on Garrison Keillor's radio variety show, A Prairie Home Companion, this coming Saturday at 6 pm.
Miller's new country music band, the Sweetback Sisters, is one of six finalists chosen to compete during the program's Talented Twenty-Somethings contest. The finalists will each play a few songs live on the air, and audience members at home will be able to cast their votes over the Internet.
Miller, 24 years old, has been playing the fiddle since she was 3 years old. Her father's job at Reuters kept the family on the move, and Miller lived in Kansas, Chicago, Hong Kong, Toronto, and southern Vermont while growing up.
A linguistic anthropology major at Brown who will be attending graduate school at Vanderbilt in the fall, she performed at the Rehoboth contra dance with the band French Roast, which included local musicians Michelle Kaminsky and Alan Bradbury, and Miller's parents, Valerie Mindel and Michael Miller.
After graduating from Brown, Miller went on tour with the Vermont-based choir Northern Harmony, performing American shape note music in Germany, England, Ireland, and the Netherlands. After discovering a mutual love of country music, Miller teamed up with another singer on the tour, Zara Bode.
Back in the States, the Sweetback Sisters duo added back-up members Stefan Amidon, Jesse Milnes, and Ross Bellenoit. Specializing in music that has been described as "honky-tonk for the modern-day cowboy and cowgirl", the group has performed gigs in Brooklyn, where Miller is now living, and has gone on a couple of tours in the Midwest and Northeast.
Miller says that performing on A Prairie Home Companion, which has been running for over 30 years and has featured performers such as Willie Nelson, Odetta, Chet Atkins, and Joshua Bell, is the band's first big break.
If Sweetback Sisters should win any prize money, it will go toward recording the group's first full-length CD. Miller would be delighted if audience members tuned in on Saturday, April 21, at 6 pm to A Prairie Home Companion and voted to support the Sweetback Sisters.
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Rehoboth MA